The Wallace–Bolyai–Gerwien theorem says that if you have two polygons of equal area, you can cut one into pieces, and then place them back together to form the second piece. Dima Smirnov and Zivvy Epstein made an interactive to demonstrate. Draw two shapes and watch the magic happen.

Odds are if you’re reading this, you know what statistics is already, but if not (or you want to explain to someone else), Crash Course just started a series to explain the basics. Watch below.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxQaBpKfDRk” /]

FiveThirtyEight asks, “There’s a lot of complaining about gerrymandering, but what should districts look like?” Looking for an answer, they imagined redistricting with different goals in mind, such as gerrymandering favoring Republicans or Democrats, promoting competitive elections, and maximizing majority-minority.

Check out the possibilities for the nation or zoom in to a specific state. The latter provides a further breakdown by district and then race. So yeah, if you’re into this stuff, set aside some time to poke at this one.

Musician Kaki King’s daughter suffers from a condition (Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura) where her body attacks her own platelets, which leads to spontaneous bruising and burst blood vessels. In coping with the stress as a parent who can only do so much for her suffering child, King collaborated with information designer Giorgia Lupi.

The result: a mix of personal data collection, reflection, music, and data art entitled Bruises — The Data We Don’t See.
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Last year, fitness tracking app Strava released a high detail map of public activity data. Looking more closely, security student Nathan Ruser noticed activity in various parts of the globe that revealed secret US army bases.
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This fake follower piece by Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris, and Mark Hansen for The New York Times is tops. In search of shortcuts to greater influence, many buy followers, likes, and retweets on Twitter. The numbers go up, but a lot of extra “influence” is just automated fluff.

The Times focuses on one company, Devumi, and investigates the follower pattern of some of the customers, as shown above. The scroll-y explanation is good. It’s even got pseudocode in there to explain the type of bots.

Good stuff.

Inspired by Dear Data, the data drawing pen pal project, designers Josefina Bravo, Sol Kawage, and Tomoko Furukawa use the postcard medium to send each other weekly how-to instructions for a wide variety of everyday things. The only rule is that they can’t use words.

As of writing this, they’re on week 37, which covered how to roll maki, how to eat an apple like a boss, and how to make mayonnaise.

Evie Liu and William Davis, reporting MarketWatch, looked at release strategies of Oscar nominees over the past few years. Some go for the wide release with the movie playing in over 1,500 theaters, whereas others choose a platform release with the movie playing in fewer than 50 theaters. The last seven of eight Best Picture winners went with the latter route.

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, for The New York Times, answer the question with a video and charts. And if you’re wondering how they generated a high resolution chart to video, Adam Pearce has you covered.

Population data typically comes in the context of boundaries. City data. County data. Country data. With their Population Estimate Service, NASA provides data at higher granularity. You can request estimated population in the context of a world grid.

Here’s an interactive map to demonstrate the API. Click and drag a shape across any region in the world and get an estimate of the population within that shape. [via kottke]

According to NASA estimates, 2017 was the second warmest year on record since 1880. Henry Fountain, Jugal K. Patel, and Nadja Popovich reporting for The New York Times:

What made the numbers unexpected was that last year had no El Niño, a shift in tropical Pacific weather patterns that is usually linked to record-setting heat and that contributed to record highs the previous two years. In fact, last year should have benefited from a weak version of the opposite phenomenon, La Niña, which is generally associated with lower atmospheric temperatures.

Good times ahead.

New data dump from the Wikimedia Foundation:

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Analytics team is releasing a monthly clickstream dataset. The dataset represents—in aggregate—how readers reach a Wikipedia article and navigate to the next. Previously published as a static release, this dataset is now available as a series of monthly data dumps for English, Russian, German, Spanish, and Japanese Wikipedias.

PornHub compared minute-to-minute traffic on their site before and after the missile alert to an average Saturday (okay for work). Right after the alert there was a dip as people rushed for shelter, but not long after the false alarm notice, traffic appears to spike.

Some interpret this as people rushed to porn after learning that a missile was not headed towards their home. Maybe that’s part of the reason, but my guess is that Saturday morning porn consumers woke earlier than usual.

From ABC News, this is a clever comparison between people’s worst fears and the number of deaths caused by the things that people fear. It starts by getting the reader to think about his or her fears and then places them in the context of causes of death.

This is a fun ditty by Vasco Asturiano. I’m a little too far out from my eighth grade jazz band days, but it’s still fun to mess around with. Notes can be arranged in different ways, and then you just mouse over the hexagons to play.